www.worldemail The best place to look for e-mail addresses. www.dejanews Archive of newsgroup postings, searchable by e-mail address.. A face in the crowd reminds us of someone we know. Moving ecstatically towards it we call out a name, only to be embarrassed with a stare of incomprehension Another face vaguely recalls a friend or a lover. Convinced it isn't, we turn away, before an aggrieved voice proves we were wrong.

To see and to look are, as Shakespeare puts it, distinct offices. Milan Kundera's latest novel asks us how often we do either and to consider the annihilating consequences of failure. His heroine, Chantal, is haunted by images of absence and dissolution. Waiting for her lover Jean-Marc in a Normandy hotel, she finds herself gripped by a conversation between two waitresses about a television programme called Lost to Sight, devoted to those who have vanished without trace. In a world which monitors her every move on surveillance cameras, where her intimacy and solitude are violated by pollsters and others jostle her in streets or supermarkets, such obliteration ought to be impossible.

Yet her ultimate terror is that were Jean-Marc to disappear, she would be morally prevented from dying, condemned to patience in the midst of an unrelenting horror. She is not, as it turns out, alone on this obsessive see-saw between being and nothingness. Jean-Marc nurtures his own images of identity scrubbed out altogether or else changed beyond all reasonable capacity for acknowledgement. A friend he has not seen since they quarrelled years ago now lies dying in hospital. Jean-Marc pays a visit, and fails to recognise the subtly refined features of his former schoolmate in this grotesque, "like the mummified head of an Egyptian princess" His friend's fears echo Chantal's.